The Underneath: sneak peek inside the book by Two Dollar Radio

“Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller.” —New York Times

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The

Under neath

Melanie Finn

Author of The Gloaming, a New York Times Notable Book

“Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller.” —New York Times

The

Under neath

Melanie Finn

Author of The Gloaming, a New York Times Notable Book

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The Gloaming by melanie finn

* New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2016 * The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” Shortlist * Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2016 * Vermont Book Award finalist “Deeply satisfying. Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller. [The Gloaming] deserves major attention.” —John Williams, New York Times “In this richly textured, intricately plotted novel, [Finn] assures us that heartbreak has the same shape everywhere. The Gloaming is chillingly cinematic in contrasting East Africa’s exquisite landscape with the region’s human needs. Yet even in a malevolent setting, Finn shows us acts of selflessness and redemption. Her fascination with the duality of Africa—‘the most honest place on earth’—shines fiercely.” —Lisa Zeidner, New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “A psychologically astute thriller that belongs on the shelf with the work of Patricia Highsmith. Alternating chapters between two continents, the book is brilliant on the pervasiveness of corruption and the murkiness of human motivation. Here is a page-turner that leaves its reader wiser.” —Karen R. Long, Newsday “Masterfully timed, frightening in its precision and delivery… a haunting story about consequence that spans literal continents. My skin prickled with every chapter. This is a story that explores coping with loss and consequence, its plot spliced with the implicit mystery of those emotions.” —Alibi “Brilliant… [The Gloaming] is a pure example of a literary pageturner, one that begins with an ending and ends with a new beginning, written by a very smart author.” —Electric Literature

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“Excellent. A wonderful book.” —The Rumpus “A propulsive literary thriller. Finn, who writes with a psychological acuity that rivals Patricia Highsmith’s, switches between Europe and Africa in tense alternating chapters, rewarding close attention. The book is terrific… subtle and thrilling. Remarkably well-paced and well-written… Don’t expect to be able to set this book down or forget its haunted characters.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Finn’s sure-footed prose, an intricate, clever plot, and the novel’s powerful examination of cultural divides enrich this story, leading up to its shocking, brilliant conclusion as Pilgrim and the others search for salvation in an unforgiving land.” —Publishers Weekly “Intense, impressive… Told with force, and bracing directness… It’s a book that smashes into you.” —The Guardian “A thought-provoking novel… deftly set in a world of mercenaries, philanthropists and witch doctors in polyester suits, the book asks how one atones for atrocity.” —Tatler “There’s an eerie, existential quality about Melanie Finn’s new novel… A paean to a magical continent of silent forests, slow, dark rivers, wild green mangroves; a world populated by child ghosts, haunted whites and AK-47-toting rebels. It is through this heart of darkness, a landscape rich in possibilities, that Pilgrim stumbles towards the light.” —New Zealand Herald “Full of empathy and intelligence… The ending is startlingly optimistic and very moving.” —Sydney Morning Herald “Compelling.” —The Australian “[The Gloaming is] intense, raw, a story less about moving on with ones’ life than learning how to live aware of life’s messy, connective tissues. And of course, it’s a testament to the striking writing of its author, Melanie Finn.” —Weird Sister

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The Underneath

Melanie Finn a novel

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SOME RECOMMENDED LOCATIONS FOR READING THE UNDERNEATH: pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology! AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH4 Libby March

ART4

An Encyclopedia of Plants, 1841

COVER IMAGES4

Ladies’ Home Journal, 1889; Atlas de poche des mammifères de France, 1910

ANYTHING ELSE? Unfortunately, yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the written permission of the publisher. WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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For Molly and Pearl my bright star, my deep sea

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Title page

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The Underneath

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Very quickly, the thick bush obscured the town, vanished it like a magic trick behind a curtain of green. Seldom is the disconnection so sudden. We were used to the slow fade: you can drive out of such African towns for several miles as bean plots and shabby huts fritter into wilderness. But fear kept Kitgum tightly contained, people cordoned inside the perimeter. They had abandoned their shambas and their homes and their ancestral graves, and within one rainy season, Uganda’s voracious herbage had taken repossession. It was very green and very quiet and you’d never guess how families had so recently toiled upon the land. There was no trace, not even a path. For 30 minutes, we just drove, hypnotized by the flat, straight road, the simmering green. The horizontal banality of the landscape became hypnotic, almost reassuring. It lulled us. And then: a government roadblock, so sudden, Marco slammed on the brakes. The soldiers demanded our passports, scrutinized Marco. In the photo he looked like Carlos the Jackal; you’d never want to let him into your country. “This is you, Marco Morals.” I bit my lip to suppress an ill-timed snicker. “Moral-es,” Marco corrected. Melanie Finn | 3

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL A young soldier stepped in, examining the name for himself. “Why is the E not silent?” “It’s Spanish,” Marco explained. “The ‘-es’ in Spanish is pronounced. Frijol-es—beans. Not holes, like English.” The soldier nodded, “I see.” Then flipped open my passport, “And you are Kay Norton.” I nodded. “Kay is a name? I have never heard this name. It is a letter, yes? An initial? What is your real name?” “Kay. That’s it. K-A-Y.” “Perhaps your passport is false.” Marco brought forth a couple of packs of Rothmans to change the subject. “Would you lads like a smoke?” The soldiers began arguing about how to divvy up the smokes. So I handed them two six-packs of Coke. As there were five of them, an intense negotiation began. Was one Coke worth three cigarettes or two? When you travel to such places, with such intentions as ours, you must be prepared. You will need not just water, food, insect repellent and extra fuel; but cigarettes, matches, sodas, snacks, money in small bills, phone vouchers. Mostly, you will need your wit. You will need to be funny and friendly because these boys in uniform teeter between boredom and fear, and they are heavily armed, and they want the comfort of your good humor. At first, they refused to let us pass. They told us it was too dangerous, some other journalists had disappeared the week before. But we promised them more cigarettes on the way back, so they let us through. Marco’s contact had told us to continue on to a village 15 miles past the roadblock, to wait there for an escort. The village was, of course, ruined and deserted. All the metal roofing, furniture, and doors had been scavenged. I had 4 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL in mind the Beatrix Potter story, The Tale of Two Bad Mice. I imagined General Christmas’s soldiers, like Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, carrying off the wooden benches from the school and the plastic table cloths from the small café and prying off the roof from the shacks. I had the impression of mischief: children let loose to undo the adult world. Because they were children, these merchants of horror, some as young as nine. We journalists jokingly called them The Elves. Marco and I wandered together as he took photographs. I doubted he would ever use any of the images, but we were fidgety, we had only our professional habits. It was hot, we didn’t know how long we’d be waiting for contact. An hour passed. Marco finally stopped photographing and fiddled with the settings on his Nikon. We sat in the shade of a charred wall and sweated. Another hour, and another. The sun downshifted and time felt gappy—ill-fitting, itchy. I started not to care anymore. What did we want with General Christmas anyway? Whatever we printed simply fed his hunger for publicity. He had no insight, he had no grand plan, no sense of justice. He was just another asshole with a big gun. I got up and walked off for a pee—not far, just the other side of the wall, what must have been a pen for goats. The fencing had been pilfered—probably for firewood, but the holes for the posts remained. Sockets in the earth. The word socket rolled around my head, one of those perfectly innocent words. A hole once filled with something necessary. A dark space, emptied out. Beside one of the holes—the sockets—there was a pile of rags in the dust. I splayed the rags open with my foot. It was a woman’s dress, ripped open from the neck down the back. Possibly, she’d worn it over another dress or wrap, the way very poor people layer clothes because they only have pieces Melanie Finn | 5

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL and if they put the pieces together they can make something whole. But, when I knelt down to examine the fabric, I could see the rusty patina, thick and dried and flaking. There was no other evidence of what had happened here: no smears of blood, no grooves of desperate fingernails in the dust. The crumbling walls were deaf to the screams or sobs of the woman who had died here, the sparrows had turned away and refused to witness. Why watch when you can’t help, when you can’t understand the human purpose of knives and guns, of inflicting pain just for the hell of it? Deliberately, I put my hand on the fabric. I needed to be sure of its reality, the congregation of molecules. It was all that remained of a woman, maybe just a girl, who’d walked barefoot every day to collect water. Her bones, her body were buried or scattered, consecrated by jackals, hyenas and maggots and scarabs. Selfishly, I felt my own fear of obliteration. Like a climber losing a foothold, I felt the need to grab on, cling tight, but what to? The air, the dust, the still, indifferent afternoon. General Christmas’s contact never came, and as evening leaned in, Marco “Morals” and I drove back to Kitgum. We drank too much cheap Ugandan beer, we had obligatory sex in the bed that was too small, and when we were finished, he immediately fell asleep, and I could not stand the feel of his body, the smell of him, the shabby whiteness of his skin like the underbelly of a fish. But mostly, it was his gender. Somewhere inside his brain, I was sure, the place he dreamed or pocketed his masturbatory fantasies, lurked that enduring and atavistic hatred of women.

6 | The Underneath

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en years later Kay felt the weight of the hammer in her hand. She imagined the heavy tow of gravity as she lifted it back and up, the beginning of the swing, then the arcing of her hand through the air. Up, up, above the back of his head. And she imagined the tipping point, where cause irrevocably becomes effect. My husband, she thought. He’s my husband. Michael stepped forward, out of reach, and Kay dropped the hammer back down to her side. She was amazed to find how she’d committed to the swing, her hand all the way back and up, shoulder height. She exhaled. “Maybe this is where they hid the bodies,” Michael joked. He was moving straight ahead of her, poking about in the dark with the flashlight. Something was banging in the far corner of the cellar. The wind started up last night and then this incessant, insistent bang, bang-bang, bang, bang-bang. Waving the flashlight back and forth, Michael scanned for the light switch. There was one at the top of the stairs but when he’d flipped it, nothing had happened. At last, he saw the empty socket hanging from a naked wire. “Jesus Christ,” he mumbled, batting it out of the way. “The Melanie Finn | 7

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL wiring is from the ’50s. I bet the whole house is like this. Behind the walls.” Wires tangled and twisted behind the walls, Kay imagined, the danger unseen. The wrong wires touch, the house burns down. Obviously, with such imminent danger, they should move out, right away; they should abandon their summer plans, run from this pretty white farmhouse, so lonely and serene and picturesque among the green hills. But Michael kept going, and she followed. They were battlehardened, after all. The flashlight illuminated a neat and sparse sub terrain: white walls, a clean workbench, a stack of sturdy wooden cabinets and drawers labeled “Wrenches,” “Screwdrivers,” “Saws”; a tier of metal shelves stacked with two large grey plastic Walmart tubs, “Quilts” and “Union Bank 2009–2016.” She noted that the floor, too, was white. If we had a basement, Kay thought, it would contain heaps and piles, willy-nilly, what we don’t really want anymore but can’t quite throw away: Freya’s baby clothes, Michael’s early scripts, my journals, Tom’s Thomas the Tank Engine collection. But we don’t have a basement, no one does in London. We have a storage unit in Luton that we never visit. Then she thought about the hammer. Already, she felt vaguely cartoonish—she hadn’t meant it. But there was a residue on her tongue, a metallic taste. “Look.” Michael aimed the light into the darkness. A doorway through the cement wall, utter blackness beyond and the distinct bang, bang-bang. There was a horror-movie feeling to this and Kay almost reached out to touch Michael and make a creepy noise. Oooooo-oooooo. Almost. He was ahead of her, poking about with the flashlight. He was saying something something I-think-it’s-alive something something but she was wondering: What if he’d turned and 8 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL seen me wielding the hammer, and shouted, “Crazy bitch!” and caught my arm and held me at bay, his eyes on mine? No one would believe him, not really. It would be a funny story he’d tell at parties, with other couples, oh, the time Kay got so mad she tried to hit me with a hammer, ha, ha, ha. But we’d know, Kay thought, Michael and I, we’d know—finally—where we stand. It would be a relief, such honesty. He was saying: “I think there’s something alive back in there.” In there, through the dark room, at the far end, a fluttering of feathery grey light. They entered the other room, this without a door, the door off its hinges, propped against the wall. Louder, the banging kept up. There was a smell, earthy, muddy, moldy— more mineral than vegetable, more vegetable than animal. Michael tripped and dropped the flashlight. The narrow beam rolled across the floor. Kay retrieved it, she scoured the floor—there, the culprit: a loose brick. Michael gave it a peevish kick and it clinked against a stack of white paint cans. “Can I have the flashlight back?” he said. She handed him the hammer instead. He looked at it. He sighed. He sighed so much these days, his silent sighing, his loud sighing, his infinite patience, it meant so much to him to be patient with her. The object ahead of them shifted back and forth in the beam of light. It was a cat, she could now see. Caught somehow. Caught in a trap. The trap had jammed against the window frame. And the banging was the animal’s ceaseless attempt to escape through the window. The cat’s front left leg was in the trap and the leg was already sheering off, exposed bone and flesh. In not too much time the cat would succeed in pulling its leg off. It hissed, a withered, whispered protest. An hour later they were waiting in the vet’s, the cat mewing and spitting and scratching but safe inside a Walmart tub. Kay had Melanie Finn | 9

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL dumped out the quilts, using one of them—quite lovely, handmade—to throw over the cat and wrangle it and the trap into the tub. “The doctor is with another patient,” the receptionist said, and Kay thought this quaint, a dog or cat as a patient. Did they wear little gowns that flapped open at the back; did they sit for chilly hours on a paper-covered table with year-old People magazines? Loud droning from the lumber yard next door periodically piqued into a high squeal as the blade cut loose another log. Kay could see a light fog of sawdust, and how, if the window were opened, this would enter and lay like a fine dust on the surface of everything. Michael was on his iPhone, scrolling through his many important messages, so she picked up a loose copy of a newspaper, the local Caledonian-Record. She always read the local papers, old habit. In Nairobi, she’d spent hours scanning the obituary pages, the faces of those “Promoted to Glory.” The obituaries were in a kind of code: “sudden death” usually meant a car crash or violent mugging; in a young person, “long illness” meant AIDS. There were often multiple obituaries for the same day, which suggested a large accident, a bus or multiple collision. The Caledonian-Record’s pages were dominated by drugs, domestic violence, child abuse, ATV accidents, and minor fraud cases. There was a new drugs task force, a town clerk was facing charges of obstruction of justice for refusing to turn over property tax collection records, a local high school teacher had successfully scaled Mt. McKinley, “The biggest challenge of my life!” On page two, above the police blotter:

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Rescued Toddler Lived in Home with Moldy Food and Dog Feces Mother Charged, Ordered To Clean Up Before Seeing Child BY BRADY WILTON Staff Writer SHEFFIELD—A toddler found wandering nearly naked on Potter Road Monday in freezing weather lived in filthy conditions, surrounded by dog feces, and had curdled milk to drink, Vermont Police say. The boy, two and a half years old, was rescued by Sheffield Selectman Bill Morris and his wife and another passerby, Feller Morgan, and then police and the state stepped in to find the child’s mother and take the child into state custody. The boy, dressed only in a dirty diaper, was found after 11 a.m. on Potter Road when the temperature on a state police cruiser was 26 degrees, Trooper Denise Polito said in her report. The boy was shivering and his lips were blue. According to Polito, the child’s mother, Michelle Whitehead, 23, of Sheffield, didn’t know that her boy had gotten out of her trailer and walked away. Whitehead told police she had just checked on the boy 15 minutes prior to when police knocked on her door in an attempt to identify the child. Trooper Polito said the boy had been gone from the trailer an hour and a half by the time they talked to the boy’s mother. Whitehead pleaded not guilty this week in Orleans Superior Court—Criminal Division to reckless endangerment and providing false information to police. Whitehead told police she was taking prescription drugs, including a painkiller called hydrocodone, Lorazepam for anxiety and Cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxer. Syringes and a small amount of heroin were also discovered on the premises. Melanie Finn | 11

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Judge Henry Van der Linde ordered Whitehead to clean up moldy and rotting food on the counters and scattered around the trailer and to clean up the dog feces in an indoor kennel where she was keeping a dog before being allowed to see her son in her home.

Why were they always smiling, Kay wondered, the children in abuse cases? No matter what was being done, what horror visited upon them day after day, these children still smiled for the camera. She looked closer at the boy. She could not detect fear. Perhaps compliance? Smile for Mommy. Kay studied, then, the sullen face of Michelle Whitehead. In pleading “not guilty,” what part of her child’s suffering did she think wasn’t her fault? Michael suddenly spoke: “Ah, dammit.” Kay put down the paper. “I’ve got to get back there.” She said nothing. “Tim’s come down with some kind of virus.” Michael furrowed his brow. “They’re airlifting him out.” Was this true? Because she suspected: you just want to get out of here. Away from me, from us. To be there. With her. Now Michael reached out as if to touch her, to put his hand on her wrist. What would his touch feel like? Warm—sweaty in this summer heat? Damp and warm? Or oddly cool and dry, papery? Ghostly. But he retracted himself, his hand awkwardly hovering above hers. At last, he lowered it to the armrest. Sometimes, she could see the small of his back, his smooth shoulder. Just fragments, fluttering like prayer flags in her memory. I used to cast myself open for him, she thought. I ached for him. But now I cannot remember how I felt—the urge to rut and the rutting itself, against bathroom sinks, on beds, on floors, in 12 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL hotel rooms. And love, hot, blind, fierce: wanting to be inside his skin. Back then—three, four years ago? Back then, we inhabited the same bodies as these that have not touched in a year. Not even a public gesture. She studied the floor, white, clean linoleum, the faint scuffing of claw marks, some dog in a panic. “When are you going?” “This afternoon. A late flight out of Montreal.” Barbara will be there, Kay thought. Barb waiting for him in the Montreal Airport Embassy Suites in lingerie, a red peephole bra, just to make her ridiculous. “And the children?” Michael rubbed his face with his hands. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Kay.” “Sorry?” Kay began, because that was as far as she could get. She could feel the weight of the hammer in her hand again, the coolness of the cellar. She looked out from herself at the large woman with the little fluffy dog and the man with his ancient black lab that had a plastic cone around its head and a massive growth on its ass. He was staring at his phone. He wasn’t reading anything. He wasn’t rifling through his messages. He was simply staring at the keypad. At last he said, “I know it was important for us.” Then the receptionist chirped in: “Mr. Ward, Mrs. Ward? Dr. Berry will see you now.” They’d never had a pet. In London it was too much hassle; in Nairobi, they’d been too busy. Freya had finally given up her campaigns for a bunny, a gerbil, a guinea pig, a kitten. On this, at least, Michael and Kay were in agreement. Kay was surprised by how much the examination room looked like their pediatrician’s—the table, the strong natural light, the expert in a white coat. “Hi, I’m Dr. Berry.” A small, neat, dark-haired man in glasses, Melanie Finn | 13

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL he glanced at the thumping, hissing tub. “Cat caught in a trap, you said?” Michael nodded, lifted the tub onto the examination table. “It’s not ours. We found it in the basement. We’re just renting for the summer.” Dr. Berry lifted the lid, pursed his lips. “That leg’s going to have to come off. Feral, by the look of her.” He put the lid back on. “Where you folks from?” “London.” “But you’re American?” “We’ve been away a long time,” Kay replied. Dr. Berry glanced at her, very briefly. Then back at Michael, he spoke specifically to Michael. “You want to know the cost of the amputation versus the cost of euthanasia?” “Sure. Yeah. That sounds reasonable.” “A grand for the amputation, 200 bucks for the other thing. What do you do in London?” “Film.” “Movies? Famous people?” “Documentaries.” Dr. Berry nodded, continued speaking only to Michael. “Thing is with the amputation, then you’ve got a three-legged wild cat that you’re going to have to domesticate somehow because in the wild a three-legged cat will last about a day before some coyote scoffs it, and poof, there’s your grand gone.” “Kill it,” Kay said. Now Dr. Berry peered at her, almost startled that she had spoken. “Yes,” Michael nodded. “Best thing.” “What kind of documentaries? Anything I’ve seen?” “Mainly Africa.” “Wildlife? My wife and I love Discovery.” “Political stuff,” Michael said. “Wars. Corruption.” Dr. Berry’s entire body swiveled toward Michael and away 14 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL from Kay, his hands braced against the examining table. He was deeply impressed. “Africa. Wow. That must get hairy.” “It can,” Michael agreed and Kay just looked out the window at the lumber yard, the arboreal carnage, the severed trunks turned toward her, row upon row, stacked a dozen feet high, oozing with sap.

Melanie Finn | 15

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BEN SURVEYED HIS HOME, SUCH AS IT WAS, BETter from the inside than the out, where the aluminum siding was coming loose, a corner piece clacking in the faintest breeze. From the outside, it was the kind of place that in a hurricane broke open like an egg, a rotten, festering egg. Inside, however, it might be cozy, when the heater was working, or it might be cool, if all the windows opened and were not, instead, permanently sealed with marine sealant. It might be homey with Jake’s toys, his clothes neatly piled on the chair. It might even be Shevaunne who’d washed them and folded them, carefully paired the socks, excised the stain from a cherry pie she might have made. She stirred on the sofa like a creature in the mud, a mutant, pink mud-puppy. Eyes still closed, she groped for her cigarettes. “Get me a coffee, willya.” He ignored her, started in on the dishes that she might have done, in that alternative world, but had not done in this actual one. “Fuck you,” she mumbled, coughed. Whatever his intention, it had not been this. Months ago, back in April, he had been coming out of the Colonial Motel in Littleton. Things had gone well with Slim in the over-heated motel room with its fecal-hued decor; they’d shared a brief celebratory joint, the operation running very smoothly, the tight teamwork, the logging truck up to Favreau’s 16 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL in Quebec. Slim was pleased. He had given Ben an ounce of coke and Ben’d demurred; he hardly ever did the stuff. But Slim pressed the baggie into his hand, “C’mon, man, I don’t have a box of chocolates.” He’d been coming out of the motel. Two women smiled at him, waved little waves, their impression of normal. We’re just normal gals going to a normal motel room in the middle of a normal day. Their wrists were thin as twigs. Behind them, a tiny fellow scampered low like a fisher cat, pointy teeth, glinty-eyed. The word was out, the junkie Twitter, Tweeker, Instagram. And they had been shifting in and out of the motel parking lot, tramping, shuffling, scuttling up and down. They looked like junkies. If you wanted to cast a movie with 20 junkies, this is as far as you’d have to go. Even the recently washed ones looked unkempt, hunched over their empty stomachs, and something about their eyes, restless and hinky. They smelled like dandruff, and compost, as if their constipation, the shit impacted for weeks in their colons, was off-gassing. Ben had been coming out into the grubby April daylight, stubborn cold from the White Mountains slapping him across the face. The snow curdled on the verges, drawing back from the debris it had hidden all winter: beer cans, dog crap, syringes. He’d been heading for his truck, stepping off the curb, when a Pajero pulled to a stop. Right there, right in front of him. Junkie car, he knew instantly. The expired registration, the missing muffler—errands the owners just never got around to because they were too busy stealing morphine patches from cancer patients or ripping off the farm stands along Route 2. The woman, the man got out. They didn’t have on coats. They were wearing sneakers. Her sweatpants were bright pink but dirty. Their faces were grey, like mushrooms in the cellar. Ben barely noticed them. Except he did. He gave the woman a second look. Because she was looking at him, an energy passed between Melanie Finn | 17

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL them, some kind of human code—and he would remember this with absolute clarity, like a particular color, even though it was happening at a micro level, below sound and light and even thought, down in the earth of the mind. She was telling him something, willing him to look, look. Her eyes catching his, shifting away, then back, then away, ahead, into the building. She stumbled at the curb, muttered some obscenity, clearly it was the curb’s fault. He’d said to himself, Please don’t— She and the man were behind him now, Please don’t— He’d heard the motel’s front door open. Please don’t, he’d thought. Please don’t let there be a kid. But of course there was a kid; the woman had been trying to tell him. With what was left of her smacked-out brain, with some remnant of her mother’s love, she’d left him in the car, her child, her asset. She wasn’t selling him. Yet. She wasn’t that far down. Yet. The “yet” was out there, she could perhaps glimpse it in the distance like a dark tower, and therein the dark walls lay all the terrible things she was capable of. She had dropped her gaze and walked past Ben. She had stumbled. She had cursed the curb. She and the man had gone into the motel to score. Ben glanced into the Pajero and saw the child. He was sitting in the middle of the back seat, no seatbelt, a hat and a jacket, filthy and too big. He was five, Ben reckoned, his eyes erased, gone like a war child, pin pricks. Ben had been five miles along the I-93 when he’d realized he knew the woman. A long time ago. The foster home in Gilman, not a bad place. Shevaunne. Shevaunne, he’d never known her last name. Shevaunne had been her family’s mattress until finally a teacher at school noticed the scab on her lip wasn’t a cold sore but syphilis. The boy, that boy. Ben felt himself gag. He could smell sour milk. Do not turn around. That boy, that child, broken doll. The next exit was six miles ahead. Do not turn around. 18 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Do not turn around. Do not fucking turn around do not open the door, the words all running together, overlapping, lapping, lapping so it was three or four voices all at once in his ears stereoscopic, do not do not open open the door the door do you hear me Benben you don’t mind Momma partying do you, Benben. He’d smelled the sour milk, the sourness of three days, the curds and the whey. He knew the boy knew the smell as he knew hunger’s metal coiling and he knew about the door you must never open, the turning around you must never do Benbenbenbenbenben. He’d exhaled and inhaled, breath ragged as an asthmatic. He’d checked the mirrors, no cops. He’d swerved into the left lane, into a pull-out used by the plow trucks, and looped back toward Littleton. I am turning around, he thought, I am turning the fuck around. And it was just that, the car turning, going back the way he’d come, not the entire Universe upending, the planet tilting on a new axis. He was just one man, in a truck, turning around. At the motel, he’d staked out the Pajero. After 30 minutes, Shevaunne—it was her, he was sure, even 20 years later, even with her brown teeth and ratty hair—and the man got back into the car; they were laughing, light of step having done a nip to take off the edge. They’d stopped at McDonald’s on the way, food for the boy, celebratory milkshakes for the grown-ups, onto the highway, exiting for Concord; then, from Route 2, a side road, a dark wood, the house within it moldering, stained, the dirty snow banked up against the windows where no sun came and no sun was wanted. There was a broken plastic climbing gym half-buried in the snow. It looked so like the house from Ben’s own childhood, he was sure he could enter and turn left down a Melanie Finn | 19

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL hallway, into the first bedroom and see his mattress on the floor with its Captain America sheets. The junkies got out of the car. When the boy did not immediately comply, the man jerked open the door and yanked him out. The boy fell in the snow. The man shouted at him to get up. Ben waited for the kick—he was sure the kick would come. But Shevaunne stepped forward, took the boy’s arm, and led him to the house. They went in, the door shut, the lights did not go on. For a week, Ben watched the house. Shevaunne and the man were too preoccupied to notice him parked on the road. They came, they went, sometimes with the boy, sometimes they left him alone in the house for hours and hours, a day, two days. Once or twice the boy came outside and wandered around the yard. He found a stick and started hitting trees and then the stick broke and he went back inside. At last, the man left by himself. Ben followed him until he saw him turn onto the interstate. Then he doubled back to the house. For a while—a dozen minutes?—he waited, considering the outcomes. Because the moment was upon him. The best thing was for him to drive away, forget it, he had his small life. But he got out of the truck. He walked up the cracked asphalt drive. He walked forward, not backward. He had momentum. “Hello?” he called, knocking on the door. The door was open. “Hey, hello?” He could hear the low murmur of the TV. His mother had loved, loved Cops. “Like home videos, eh, Benben,” she’d say with a chuckle, tousling his hair. She’d watched the screen intently, imagining she might one day see someone she knew. From Ben’s perspective, she’d known them all, every loser, methhead, crack-head, smack-head, face down, perp-walker, always wearing flip-flops and cargo shorts, tatts and tank tops. They were the same; they were interchangeable. Paulie, Rickie, Dickie, Bill, Jed, do not turn around do not turn around who do we have here? 20 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL “Shevaunne?” Ben’s voice intruded into the still house. No one moved much in here, the air stiff with the smell of microwave popcorn and unwashed hair and cheap coffee. “Fuh? Wha?” He heard a garbled yelp from the back room. “Shevaunne? I’m an old friend. Ben, Ben Comeau. I’m at the front door.” She ambled out. From a distance, in the poor light, she looked pretty, she looked young, but when she came closer he could see how her mascara and eye-liner were smeared, seeping into the cracks around her narrow eyes. Her hair was limp, greasy. “Wha? Who the fuck’r you?” “Ben Comeau. The home in Gilman? Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, you remember?” She tilted her head, which put her off balance and she staggered. “Ben?” By now the boy had slipped along the hallway and hovered behind her. He was small, feral, and gave the impression of being difficult to catch. “You had zits.” The memory focused her, an image she could grab on to. “They were seeping.” Her eyes were so narrow, he couldn’t see the color, he thought blue. “Whaddya wan, Ben?” He glanced at the boy and she smiled a little smile as she reached out to touch her son, her hand on his head. “You a kiddie fiddler?” A reasonable question—though, was she asking or offering? “No.” “Some church thing? You wanna pray or some shi?” “I want you to come and live with me, you and the boy. I’ll take care of you.” “I don think so.” Her voice was lazy and slow. She was in the easy hammock of her high. “There’s a good school for him,” Ben gestured to the boy. “He’ll have regular food.” “Get the fuh out,” she said. Melanie Finn | 21

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL But Ben would not. He had turned around. He was not all ruin. There was sunshine and fields of flowers. He had turned around, he had opened the door. This was why he had come. He knew she was watching him, trying to figure him out, if he was a freak or a weirdo and how much longer it might be until her boyfriend got back. He looked directly back at her, “And I have a steady supply for you, Shevaunne.” She had shrugged her junkie shoulders. She had all the loyalty of a plastic bag on a windy day.

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he house emerged through the fringing green of sheltering maples. It was calendar pretty, with its high, peaked roof, dormers, and white clapboard siding. Already, Kay referred to it as home—she and Michael were coming home from the vet’s—though they’d only been here two weeks. What might it be like to live here, to possess this summer beauty? The views tilted south across rough fields and dense green woods, not another house for miles. Dawns unfolded in silence broken only by birdsong; so quiet she could hear the snap-snap of chickadees’ wings as they flew to the bird-feeder. It was the opposite of London with its hard angles, its miserly slabs of light. The monthly rent was cheap, and Kay had wondered why the house hadn’t already been taken. According to an email from Alice, the caretaker, it had no internet and extremely poor cell phone coverage, and “people want that nowadays.” This lack of communication had, ironically, proved the main attraction to Michael. They would play cards as a family in the evening, they would take walks and read books. With the children at day camp, Michael would have time to work on his latest proposal and Kay to write whatever it was she was writing. They wouldn’t be distracted by the siren song of internet news and Netflix. That had been the idea, the promise. But here was Michael, sitting beside her, catching the very last Melanie Finn | 23

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL bar of reception on approach. He always wanted her to drive so he could tap-tap-tap his phone. The past few nights, she’d heard him talking in the bathroom, murmur murmur. He had to stand on the toilet, twisting his whole body at an odd angle to get even one bar. How did he contort himself like this for so long? She couldn’t make out the words or even his tone, and she couldn’t creep up on him as the floor boards were too creaky. He would mumble on and on, whomever he was talking to—Barbara?— never seemed to reply. A few feet ahead of the car, yellow butterflies clustered on a puddle in the middle of the drive. Kay slowed, and when the butterflies did not fly off, she braked. “Stop,” she said. She turned off the engine. Michael didn’t hear her or wasn’t listening. He kept tapping. She slammed her hand on the dashboard. “Stop tapping!” His finger poised mid-air, he sighed. “What are we going to do, Michael?” Michael. His name was hard on her tongue. It was what she called him now, not Babe or Love. They’d gone full circle back to the formality of Christian names. Only it meant something entirely different now. He looked ahead, a long moment, then down at his phone. Kay could see his finger twitching; he was in the middle of a text. “I’m arranging a cab,” he said, and with two more taps, pressed send. They sat. Kay did not start the car. She watched the light sifting through the maples, the yellow drifting butterflies. She and Michael hadn’t come here to save their marriage, they’d come to end it. The taxi driver was a grizzled man who smelled of cigarettes and wheezed as he tried to lift Michael’s heavy black Peli case. Michael took it from him, easily swung it into the trunk. He was 24 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL physically strong. He used to lift Kay like that and toss her on the bed and fuck her. “Daddy!” Tom lurched forward again, wrapping himself around Michael’s leg. Kay glanced at Freya, her dark and judgemental eyes, and felt relief that it was Michael letting her down. Freya, who stored the wrongs done to her like candy during Lent; she’d binge on it one day, all that injustice, all that blame. Afternoon was tilting into evening, a powdery apricot sunset. The looming maples slowly lost their dimension, turned inky and solid against the darkening sky. There was no wind, and far, far off, the sound of the interstate, a murmur upon the air that you had to listen for. Kay pried Tom away from Michael, lifted him into her arms because she still could. “We’ll Skype as soon as we can.” Michael got in the taxi, he waved, blew kisses to his children. For the briefest moment, he looked at Kay, and Kay had no idea what she saw in his eyes or what he intended her to see. The taxi moved off, down the drive, and Kay could discern Michael’s head, already bent and intent on his phone.

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BEN TOOK JAKE TO THE LAKE. “I’m taking Jake to the lake,” he sang, his hands on the wheel, the boy beside him, now early July and three months of good food and clean clothes and a Big Wheel. But still Jake did not speak. He had no voice. For so long no one had listened. Ben took his hand, enfolded it like a small, soft mouse. They walked toward the water. It was a perfect afternoon. The hills curled around the lake, a green embrace. The water held the sky, as if a piece had fallen. Sky was somehow liquid, the elements all merging into one—air, water, light—even the trees seemed aqueous in the heat. Only the earth beneath their bare feet remained solid, dark, what held them to this place and time. They reached the water. Jake hesitated. He stuck out a white toe, not quite touching the water, so it seemed accusatory, like a pointed finger. Ben stepped forward, the water up to his shins, smiled, “Feels good.” Jake followed; ankle deep, his grip tightened. They eased out a few more feet, and he stopped. Ben bent down and picked him up. “I’ll hold you. I won’t let you go.” They waded out, the boy clinging to his hip. “It’s not so deep. You can still stand here. You want me to put you down?” A shake of the head. So Ben held on, squatting down in the 26 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL water, submerging the both of them to their chests. Jake gasped at the cold, squeezing Ben’s shoulder, both panic and delight. In the water, he became weightless, he might float away, so Ben held him tighter. He could smell the boy’s skin, his dark hair. He felt an odd punching in his chest, almost like lust, and he wondered if this was what pedophiles felt, the beauty of the child, the ease of destruction—a kind of terror at one’s own power. What have I done, he thought, this is what I have done, and he was clear again, as the boy began to smile, to laugh, a foreign sound, like a migrant bird blown off course.

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ow quiet the night. Tom and Freya had spooled in all sound, they sucked it up, hoarding it in their cells. Sound slept with them now, needing its rest, so that in the morning, it might again reverberate with force: singing, arguing, things dropping, breaking, feet always running, questions firing, Mum, Mum, Mummy. Kay could almost feel the pressure of silence upon her ears, like a plane descending. She had her own silence now; she was not pleading or nagging, admonishing. She did not hear her own voice rise with the words, Where are your shoes hurry up weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re late pick up your towel. She did not have to find the way to say Michael that did not accuse or accost or echo. She tidied away the last of the dishes, wiped down the sink. Two small lights winked in the valley below. The darkness made distance immeasurable, irrelevant. There became here, hills and stars in atomic continuity with the lawn just beyond the window. A planeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lights blinked overhead, and she imagined Michael, 30,000 feet above the Atlantic. He would have had his meal. He would be working on his laptop in the halo of his overhead light. Barbara was beside him, her arm touching his, the unfussy touch of their intimacy. Or she was waiting for him in Amsterdam or Dublin, wherever his flight hubbed through. She was issuing a flurry of ardent texts. She was shaving her legs. And Michael was moving away, away. Kay had a strong 28 | The Underneath

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL impression of this separation, of the white house around her and the steel plane around Michael, the movement of the plane, the counter movement of the earth and the house upon it, so that she, too, was moving away from him. She stood still, observing the kitchen around her, the true house barely visible beneath the chaotic, sticky overlay of her family. The people who lived here lived here impeccably. If things were noise, then they lived silently. In Michael’s absence, she began to notice; for it was as if their marital arguments, both spoken and furiously internalized, had created a white noise, filling the space. Now she saw the bookless, dustless shelves. The effort to empty the rooms, not just of things but of their selves seemed more than was necessary for a summer rental—though Alice had assured her that the owners lived here year ’round. But how they lived: traceless, immaculate, mute, tidy as white mice, ceaselessly washing their neat pink paws. For instance, there was no crap drawer of mystery keys, desiccated rubber bands, scratched sunglasses, an odd sock, batteries of indeterminate charge. Nor was there a closet piled with hurriedly folded bedding, nor bags of clothes long intended for Goodwill. The cutlery was arranged, the plates stacked, the towels arrayed. The flashlight had its hook by the door. The aesthetic was of rigid order. The walls were bare but for a fading photograph thumbtacked above the sink: a cabin by a blue lake in a bowl of green hills; a perfect summer day. And in the back of the hall closet, Kay had found an old phone, dusty as a relic. There was a jack in the wall, but no connection. She switched off the downstairs light and turned for the stairs. When Michael was here, she’d been the last one up, and she had done this—the turning off of the light. Now she hesitated, considering the lock of the door. She had never locked it. She had liked the feeling of not locking it. They were living Melanie Finn | 29

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL where they did not need a lock. They were safe. Safe as houses, safe as unlocked houses. Wasn’t that what country people smugly asserted: we don’t need to lock our doors. For who would come this way, so far out, along the pitchdark dirt road to a house with nothing in it. Nothing but warm blood, she thought—she thought as a little joke, like watching Jaws before swimming in the sea, and so she did not lock the door.

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Praise for Melanie Finn’s The Gloaming

“Richly textured, intricately plotted... The Gloaming is chillingly cinematic in contrasting East Africa’s exquisite landscape with the region’s human needs. Yet even in a malevolent setting, Finn shows us acts of selflessness and redemption. Her fascination with the duality of Africa—‘the most honest place on earth’—shines fiercely.” —Lisa Zeidner, New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “A psychologically astute thriller that belongs on the shelf with the work of Patricia Highsmith. Alternating chapters between two continents, the book is brilliant on the pervasiveness of corruption and the murkiness of human motivation. Here is a page-turner that leaves its reader wiser.” —Karen R. Long, Newsday “A propulsive literary thriller. Finn, who writes with a psychological acuity that rivals Patricia Highsmith’s, switches between Europe and Africa in tense alternating chapters, rewarding close attention. The book is terrific... subtle and thrilling. Remarkably well-paced and well-written... Don’t expect to be able to set this book down or forget its haunted characters.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Finn’s sure-footed prose, an intricate, clever plot, and the novel’s powerful examination of cultural divides enrich this story, leading up to its shocking, brilliant conclusion.” —Publishers Weekly “Intense, impressive... Told with force, and bracing directness... It’s a book that smashes into you.” —The Guardian

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